Across Tajikistan With Boney M
Dushanbe, Tajikistan, June 1
Yesterday I got a taxi from Tashkent to the Tajik border at Bekabad. The drive was more interesting than I expected, with a lot of great views of the countryside. This is the beginning of silkworm season, so a lot of people were cutting off the branches from mulberry trees and hauling them to their houses, where the silkworms are. The farmers buy eggs from a state-run cooperative, and a few weeks later they sell back the cocoons. In most of the arable parts of Uzbekistan there are lots of mulberry trees planted along roads and between fields. I also saw some people getting rice paddies ready for flooding and planting, which involves a whole lot of digging. I can't imagine it's much fun, especially if you don't have any of the little multipurpose tractors rice farmers in Korea and China have.
The border crossing into Tajikistan was extremely quick and easy. I wasn't even given a declaration form. Hopefully they won't try to say I'm exporting my camera and binoculars when I go to Kyrgyzstan.
I had to get a second taxi from Bekabad to Khojand, which turned out to be easy. It ended up being six of us in the car: me and the driver in front and four Tajiks in the back. Since one of them was quite fat they were really wedged in back there. But they refused my repeated attempts to offer the front seat.
The drive to Dushanbe takes 12 hours with stops, and you really don't want to miss the scenery, so I killed time in Khojand by visiting a big statue of Lenin and the main bazaar, which seemed like a good contrast. My hotel was called the Leninabad, and was not bad. The main drag of Khojand is still named ulitsa Lenina, although it has some operating Islamic school on it now.
This morning I hired another shared taxi out of Khojand at 6:30. It turned out I was actually sort of late for the trip to Dushanbe, and only a couple more departures were expected. I ended up taking the fifth seat (middle of the back) in a Mercedes driven by a guy who seemed relatively sane and calm. Some sections of the road are very steep and there are very few guardrails, so I had decided I was not going to search for the cheapest ride available. Being in the middle was actually not bad since I could look out on both sides. The other passengers had done the drive before but were quite tolerant of my constant rubbernecking. There is an oddly high number of Mercedes cars in Tajikistan, considering the country has a per capita GNP around $300 a year. The reason may not be entirely unrelated to those pretty flowers that grow just south of the Afghan border.
The drive was every bit as good as I had hoped (one guidebook calls it "one of the world's great road trips." The road goes over two passes over 11,000 feet (3,378 m and 3,372 m), and I definitely felt the beginnings of some altitude effects. But since Dushanbe is not very high I wouldn't be spending long enough at high altitude to cause any real problems.
My companions turned out to be Tajik dentists heading for a convention in Dushanbe. One of them spoke some English, and had also brought 5 or 6 cassette tapes to play. The tapes were mostly Russian pop, but also a greatest hits collection of the reggae-disco group Boney M.
As we headed south, I was again struck how similar the buildings were to the adobe houses in Arizona and New Mexico. We went through the vegetation zones and above the treeline, just like a diagram in a geography book. The first pass was pretty good, but the second (Ayni
Pass) was astounding. We crossed into a beautiful high valley surrounded by snowcapped peaks, with a few clouds coming in around the highest ones. The soundtrack turned out to be Boney M's "Rasputin." For some reason (probably mild oxygen deprivation) the lyrics seemed somehow appropriate for the occasion:
Rah-Rah-Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen
They poured some poison into his wine
Rah-Rah-Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine
He drank it all and said, "I feel fine"
As we headed into Dushanbe we accepted about the twentieth offer of a carwash (these offers consisted of kids lightly spraying our car with hoses). Getting the mud off south-heading vehicles seems to be one of the major local industries. We stopped for about 20 minutes to let the car get fully dry, and I shared out the last of the horsemeat sausage that I'd bought in Tashkent.
Dushanbe (which means "Monday" in Tajik, a fact some local Abbott and/or Costello has no doubt taken advantage of) looked nice and green after the mountain drive. I will begin to find out about heading south on the Pamir Highway tomorrow.
Yesterday I got a taxi from Tashkent to the Tajik border at Bekabad. The drive was more interesting than I expected, with a lot of great views of the countryside. This is the beginning of silkworm season, so a lot of people were cutting off the branches from mulberry trees and hauling them to their houses, where the silkworms are. The farmers buy eggs from a state-run cooperative, and a few weeks later they sell back the cocoons. In most of the arable parts of Uzbekistan there are lots of mulberry trees planted along roads and between fields. I also saw some people getting rice paddies ready for flooding and planting, which involves a whole lot of digging. I can't imagine it's much fun, especially if you don't have any of the little multipurpose tractors rice farmers in Korea and China have.
The border crossing into Tajikistan was extremely quick and easy. I wasn't even given a declaration form. Hopefully they won't try to say I'm exporting my camera and binoculars when I go to Kyrgyzstan.
I had to get a second taxi from Bekabad to Khojand, which turned out to be easy. It ended up being six of us in the car: me and the driver in front and four Tajiks in the back. Since one of them was quite fat they were really wedged in back there. But they refused my repeated attempts to offer the front seat.
The drive to Dushanbe takes 12 hours with stops, and you really don't want to miss the scenery, so I killed time in Khojand by visiting a big statue of Lenin and the main bazaar, which seemed like a good contrast. My hotel was called the Leninabad, and was not bad. The main drag of Khojand is still named ulitsa Lenina, although it has some operating Islamic school on it now.
This morning I hired another shared taxi out of Khojand at 6:30. It turned out I was actually sort of late for the trip to Dushanbe, and only a couple more departures were expected. I ended up taking the fifth seat (middle of the back) in a Mercedes driven by a guy who seemed relatively sane and calm. Some sections of the road are very steep and there are very few guardrails, so I had decided I was not going to search for the cheapest ride available. Being in the middle was actually not bad since I could look out on both sides. The other passengers had done the drive before but were quite tolerant of my constant rubbernecking. There is an oddly high number of Mercedes cars in Tajikistan, considering the country has a per capita GNP around $300 a year. The reason may not be entirely unrelated to those pretty flowers that grow just south of the Afghan border.
The drive was every bit as good as I had hoped (one guidebook calls it "one of the world's great road trips." The road goes over two passes over 11,000 feet (3,378 m and 3,372 m), and I definitely felt the beginnings of some altitude effects. But since Dushanbe is not very high I wouldn't be spending long enough at high altitude to cause any real problems.
My companions turned out to be Tajik dentists heading for a convention in Dushanbe. One of them spoke some English, and had also brought 5 or 6 cassette tapes to play. The tapes were mostly Russian pop, but also a greatest hits collection of the reggae-disco group Boney M.
As we headed south, I was again struck how similar the buildings were to the adobe houses in Arizona and New Mexico. We went through the vegetation zones and above the treeline, just like a diagram in a geography book. The first pass was pretty good, but the second (Ayni
Pass) was astounding. We crossed into a beautiful high valley surrounded by snowcapped peaks, with a few clouds coming in around the highest ones. The soundtrack turned out to be Boney M's "Rasputin." For some reason (probably mild oxygen deprivation) the lyrics seemed somehow appropriate for the occasion:
Rah-Rah-Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen
They poured some poison into his wine
Rah-Rah-Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine
He drank it all and said, "I feel fine"
As we headed into Dushanbe we accepted about the twentieth offer of a carwash (these offers consisted of kids lightly spraying our car with hoses). Getting the mud off south-heading vehicles seems to be one of the major local industries. We stopped for about 20 minutes to let the car get fully dry, and I shared out the last of the horsemeat sausage that I'd bought in Tashkent.
Dushanbe (which means "Monday" in Tajik, a fact some local Abbott and/or Costello has no doubt taken advantage of) looked nice and green after the mountain drive. I will begin to find out about heading south on the Pamir Highway tomorrow.
posted by jeros | 3:33 PM
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